Into the Night
by Dixie Cross
Summary: "An' den dey talks kinder low an' Ah doan hear all whut dey say..." I read this line and couldn't help but write a quick one-shot about what they might have said, with hopefully different results. Time frame is right after Bonnie's accident, before even her funeral.


Scarlett waited for the sound of his heavy footfalls on the landing. Her heels ground the carpet thin as she paced in front of her open bedroom door. The hushed rustle of a servant's feet on wood, the distant clatter of dishes or the echo of unseen, unwanted guests drifted intermittently through the thick stillness of the Peachtree Mansion. And always, always, the creaking of the floor boards as Scarlett moved back and forth, back and forth; her swaying skirts the pendulum that kept the hour of day, marked the passage of time since Bonnie's accident.

The minutes crept by. The whispered sounds clanged, bells of brute noise, in Scarlett's keen ears. Every tick of an unfound, unstopped clock, every buzz of an errant insect stretched her taut nerves. The muscles in her neck and shoulders wound tighter and tighter. The anger coiled with the desperation. The sun began to sink behind the knotted trees outside her cracked-open window, snaking spindly shadows across her room. She twisted a damp handkerchief in her hands. Her fingers were raw from the nervous idleness.

Where was he? Why did he get to escape? Why didn't she?

Occasionally she would catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror, the crepe sliding off the frame. She would recoil at the sight. That slight figure in funeral black could not be her! That sheet-white, haggard face could not be hers! Those eyes—pinched, furious, wounded—outlined in red and bruised from sleepless nights of grief, could not be her eyes. This could not be her life.

The room would spin. Her reflection would fade. Unshed tears burned in her throat and nostrils. She would douse them with a steely resolve, not cold, but strong. Straitening her spine and clenching her teeth she would resume her endless march.

At length she heard it. She heard him. Smoothing back the fallen wisps of hair, she stormed out into the hall. His broad back was slipping behind the bedroom door and she hurried her step to catch him before he locked himself into the room—shutting out everyone and everything, but the lifeless body of their daughter, of her daughter.

"Rhett," Scarlett said, throwing out her arm and barring the door from latching.

He halted. His back tensed, arching as a predator that has become the prey. She dropped her arm and waited for him to face her. The stale stench of alcohol and fetid clothing, of rotting smoke and dirty skin rose off him. His jacket was wrinkled. His hair was unkempt. His boots—usually so pristine and polished—were caked in a foul film of mud and manure.

Scarlett kept her gaze locked on him, straining to avoid seeing the porcelain figure dressed in blue, swallowed up in the sheets of Rhett's bed. Disgust and annoyance rankled within her. Her voice sharpened, it rose.

"The funeral is set for tomorrow morning."

Slowly he turned around. Scarlett had to bite her tongue to stop the gasp from escaping. A drunken madness enlivened his sharp features, twitching in his curled lip and glinting, as real and jagged as a rusty knife, from his black eyes. In a voice laced with danger, he spoke.

"Do that and I will kill you tomorrow."

Scarlett shook with a chill at the threat. And when he took a step closer, her aching heart fluttered. Some more of the fury fled away in fear. She stepped back.

But then a strange, almost pleading light crept into Rhett's crazed, bloodshot gaze. Suddenly he looked fragile, weaker than she had ever seen him, a shriveled, lost stranger instead of a sinister, bleeding beast. A memory of another man, with the same broken expression, nudged at the borders of her mind. Her brain fumbled to recall the exact face of the other man.

In that murmur of a pause, the fading sun shifted. The bright pastel sky dimmed, drawing Scarlett's eyes at last to her daughter, who slept just beneath the open window. The pink light of sunset warmed the glassy cheeks and threw into relief Bonnie's square jaw and wide brow. Clear recollection stirred in Scarlett's mind, booming through the anguish and fright. Even in death, her daughter looked like her pa.

And as Scarlett thought of Gerald, she flicked her eyes back to Rhett. With a swift rush of understanding came the heartstopping clarity of dawn, spreading light over a dark and forsaken patch of earth. She could see the once lively face drained of vigor and mirth, see the blow of a loved one that fractures an active mind into a mindless nothing, see the former reckless fearlessness, so like her father's, turned to hopelessness, in the slovenly, shattered man who slouched before her.

She stared in wonder; a wonder removed from her own anguish, and plucked her hand over her breast. Her heart drummed in a quiet rhythm. Something was softening its beat. It was a feeling foreign to her, foreign or long-since forgotten, abandoned on the winding, harsh road that spanned the years between those carefree days of her youth and the toilsome days since. Rhett opened his palms to her, in an age-old gesture of pleading.

"Scarlett, how can you put our baby in the dark? The great and powerful dark? She's so small. She's all alone. She's scared of the dark."

The call for mercy, for compassion prickled against her skin. Part of Scarlett wanted to fling his supplication back in his sallow face, to turn a blind eye to his pain and forget the memory that had begun to tenderize her anger and absolve his guilt. But she saw again, from the corner of her eye, the profile of her father in her daughter; saw again the despair of her father in the face of her husband. Rhett's hands were still splayed toward her, begging for kindness.

Scarlett hesitated, only a moment, a quick, dry breath, before she closed the distance and wrapped her arms around Rhett. He stiffened at her embrace but the feel of his closeness, the warmth of his body, touched something deep within her. She had sought to comfort him, but his unmatched caress was soothing her. She pressed her cheek to his chest and shut her lids.

"Rhett," she cried, her tears springing free and cleaning his soiled shirt. "Our baby doesn't need to fear the dark. I know it. She's safe with my mother, with my pa…"

Scarlett's sob strangled her voice and she clung tighter to her unyielding husband. The words began to pour from her mouth, babbles of her anger, of her desperation. They were their own kind of pain. On and on she went, weeping against his immobile, hard body.

Finally she glanced up at him through her veil of wet lashes. Rhett's hands had fallen, at some point. They hung limply at his sides. But with her ear against his chest she could hear the slowing of his heart beat. And his dark eyes were calm, careful, glossy with questions and tears.

"I don't blame you, darling," she whispered. "I don't Rhett…I was just so…Bonnie was so like pa. I can't blame him for taking those silly fences. I.."

"Gerald will keep her safe. He wouldn't let her go alone into the dark," he said, his voice husky. Scarlett heard the question, the glimmer of hope in his words.

She dropped her eyes and shook her head, mumbling into his shirt, "No, he wouldn't."

Instantly Rhett's arms wound around her waist, his head burrowed into her neck. His huge shoulders started to shake, his throaty heaves wracking his body, and hers.

The sun disappeared. The moon shone. Scarlett and Rhett cried on through the night. In the dark, in the black, their hearts tangled together, their separate grief became woven into one. Mammy stumbled into Rhett's room just as the horizon started to glow with the promise of a new day. She found the two parents asleep on the floor beside the bed, their hands locked in a tender clasp.

_Disclaimer: All characters, property, rights, etc. owned, sadly, not by me, but by the Mitchell estate. _

_Note: I'll update AGW soon. I had to write this what-if in order to finish that. Eh. I like one-shots (apart from AGW, I've sworn off longer stories). I wrote this on my last flight leg before coming home tonight. So happy to be home._


End file.
